Swordpen
From Papercut to Paper Carving
Like sculpture, papercut art is the act of creation through the act of taking away. Papercutting is a traditional form of Jewish art, frequently appearing on marriage contracts over centuries. It appears in several other cultures, like in China, and Germany's Scherenschnitte, and styles vary widely. Hand cut with an extremely sharp knife, each piece requires multiple fresh blades. Work can be reproduced with a laser cut in some cases. While traditional papercut is often symmetrical and flawless, blade.meets.paper carvings burst with emotional, autobiographical energy, often appearing haphazard. Sophia Tupolev's Series 1 asks difficult, intimate questions about a woman's role within herself, in relation to romantic partners and the zeitgeist. Series 2 examines the inner worlds of family and friends.
SERIES 1
A Determined Woman
Carved from white acid-free paper, 110 gram weight, 42 x 29.7 cm.
Are we living a predetermined destiny, and what role do our romantic partners play in our determination?
The text can be read in two different ways. At the surface, this work cites the messages in the original illustrations in Be Here Now, a spiritual text by Ram Dass.
But in order to read deeper into the text of the piece, take a closer look at the collar and chain around the neck of A Determined Woman.
ACompartmentalized Woman
Carved from white acid-free paper, 110 gram weight, 35.5 x 29.7 cm.
Do you eat steak?
Here, the compartmentalized woman is split up into parts, labelled as cuts of beef on a diagram of a cow. But the message is not objectification- that would have been too easy…. The depiction of her body, and the red background, is her animal nature. It’s about the woman’s two inner worlds:
Behind the woman are the things that are emotionally significant to her. The things she’s learned. The smell of a particular perfume. Her career, a home-cooked meal. Religious values. Some of the compartments even hide little hearts.
Can the animal and the emotional co-exist, or does survival depend on compartmentalizing them?
Does separating between her animal nature vs. her spiritual nature… liberate her? Or make her just a piece of meat?
A Guesswork Woman
Carved from white acid-free paper, 110 gram weight, 42 x 29.7 cm.
This paper carving asks: Who are we to others?
If love is a game with no certain outcome, we may not always know where we stand.
Here, the woman is playing with her hands literally tied behind her back. She looks over her shoulder to the Wordle-style grid, trying to guess the word - the identity of herself in the situation depicted. If you play Wordle, you see that she could have guessed the answer from the first two lines, but she is at a competitive disadvantage. And the game grid itself breaks down in line 5.
By the time she figures out the answer - in green - does it even matter anymore?
This is a piece about miscommunication in intimate relationships, and it references different cultures with a brick wall, tiled floor, and eastern themes…a factor that often contributes to moments of misunderstanding. But at the end of it, the piece is about the different identity layers in all of us, and how they play out vis-a-vis other people.
A Reflected Woman
Carved from white acid-free paper, 110 gram weight, 35.5 x 29.7 cm.
A self portrait, in a vulnerable moment- a fitting room mirror in Paris, December 2021. The piece is about the contrast between what women are told- in cheap slogans screaming from glossy magazines and ads- “you go girl, you’re enough, want what you have,” and the like.
Versus, the inner voice of self doubt, “how do I look? Will it ever be enough? Is this it…?”
My work asks, do the empty cliches and expectations we are raised on serve us, or do they actually produce the opposite effect and chip away at us?
The pursuit for perfection in one’s external appearance can be a useful mechanism of control, when everything else is out of our hands. But no matter how fine the French lace, no matter how exquisite the gems, no matter how small the jeans, this is still “fake it” without the “make it.”
Then, what is “making it?” To do it all, have it all, and be it all? Being real with yourself and just doing what you need to do to keep it all spinning? And at what cost?
A Sensible Woman
Carved from white acid-free paper, 110 gram weight, 42 x 29.7 cm.
Meet “A Sensible Woman” - but just how common is common sense?
Using a mashup of emails from the bank to open a corporate bank account as well as snippets from the Declaration of Independence in the original font styling, this piece perches on the precarious balance between the professional and the personal.
A Leading Woman
Carved from white acid-free paper, 110 gram weight, 42 x 29.7 cm.
What does it take to be a leader?
You could ask the ultimate executive, one carrying the weight of responsibility 24/7, keeping it all together under the weight of the world’s expectations- any mother.
What does she see when she looks in the mirror, between bathtime and bedtime, before her third shift starts- bouncing between her computer and tomorrow’s lunches, when the children go to sleep?
How much strategic thinking will it take to pull it all off and make it look easy?
And as she’s pictured in her closet mirror, belongings askew on shelves, will the compartmentalizing work? Will she ever manage to be in the moment in the dualities of her quotidian duties? As always - more questions than answers.
A Clockwork Woman
Carved from white acid-free paper, 110 gram weight, 35.5 x 29.7 cm.
This work examines the use of our finite time and energy. Try to tell the time by the position of the woman’s legs, as she sprawls across the clock. But upon closer inspection, the numbers are off by one, like a simple Caesar cipher. It isn’t so simple…
The woman’s insides are the mechanics of the timepiece.
And while a mechanical watch draws its energy from an internal, tightly coiled spring, this clock gets its energy from the aspirational words coiled around its exterior.
Where do you possibly get the time to be all of those things? …
And it’s up to this woman to make it all tick, to keep the trains running on time, and to properly allocate her most precious resource.
The stakes are high. Because time is a resource you can never replenish once it’s spent. That’s a lot of pressure for anyone.
The Subversion of Justice
Carved from white acid-free paper, 110 gram weight, 42 x 29.7 cm.
Under the weight of columns morphing into bones and a once stoic Lady Justice that’s been completely physically incapacitated, this was not an easy one to carve.
The world can sometimes feel so lacking in justice and fairness, and I’ve chosen to depict the violent denial of justice through a ball & chain, ropes, chains, a harness, straps and spikes.
It’s overbearing, because injustice is unbearable. There was no subtle alternative for me this time.
The piece is meant to challenge the viewer to stand up in the face of injustice- because in the world we live in, silence = complicity.
SERIES 2
The Bride's Prayer
Carved from white acid-free paper, 110 gram weight, 35.5 x 29.7 cm.
This is one of the most beautiful real-life moments, where my best friend @lizabeloch prays at the Western Wall at 1:00 AM after her wedding in Jerusalem. She is surrounded by a cascade of prayers on notes from those who have come before.
In the work, the wall is the Kotel, which represents a window into the desired future - the vision of a world one prays for.
I called it The Bride’s Prayer, so that the viewer would think about what a bride might be praying for on her wedding day, one of the most powerful moments in her destiny.
Papercutting is a traditional form of Jewish art, frequently seen on marriage contracts for centuries. Traditional papercut is very symmetrical and perfect. For this work it was doubly hard for me to express the beauty through damage/imperfections in the wall, in breaking the forms, breaking with tradition, while exalting the flawlessness of the bride.
Inner Voice
Carved from white acid-free paper, 110 gram weight, 35.5 x 29.7 cm.
Yes. Parenting is a messy business. Toys all over the floor, half-eaten fruit under the couch…and it’s not always easy to stay cool. On top of that, it’s a fight to stop defaulting to the way we were raised, for some.
It is said that our inner voice - the way we speak to ourselves in the privacy of our minds - the belief that “I can” or “I can’t” - is formed by the way our caregivers spoke to us (reference to that squeezed into the bottom left corner).
If that’s true, then - beyond staying cool, parents have immense power to influence the way their children will respond to stress (or stressful people) out in the world, for their entire lives. Simply with our word choices.
In the background of this new piece, are the words, the words that I want my children to hear out loud today, and later, in the back of their minds. No matter who crosses their path. That they will carry this understated superpower in their hearts and not believe anything different they hear, out there.
Certainly, I don’t always succeed. I can’t always find the perfect words. But I do try. And to me, parenting is hovering in the delicate balance between what we can, and what we can’t.
In the center of this image is my younger daughter, Millie, she is almost 2. And the words filling the background and her shirt are the real words she hears from me. I know, I am so cheesy.
The Ties That Bind
Carved from white acid-free paper, 110 gram weight, 35.5 x 29.7 cm.
What ties us to others in permanent ways? I’ve heard love described as an invisible string in a children’s book. And I’ve heard the universe described as the connections between nodes, in a quantum physics book. Since I want to believe that the world is abundant with love, we must all be connected by invisible strings of varying strength and tautness.
Some strings are the gossamer threads of a spiderweb- ephemeral but enduring. Others are the leaden links of expectations in obligatory relationships. In between, strings woven of wire strands cry a beautiful note when struck with a bow, like a cello. And other strings that almost glow with that fiery red of a Kabbalah bracelet, wearing themselves down to a thread with exposure to enough time.
We go through life casting our heartstrings out like fishing lines into the world, not knowing where the hooks will land. We bond with friends, partners, and lovers, not knowing if those strings will end up ephemeral, enduring, leaden, beautiful, glowing, threadbare, or a million other things. The only thing for sure is that outcomes are uncertain.